


drives you insane

by murbeft



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 05:08:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5035012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/murbeft/pseuds/murbeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They found their lost Hulk. It just wasn't the one they were expecting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Set shortly after Age of Ultron.

[Ruby’s Diner, Upstate New York]

“So how are they doing?”

“Do you really need to ask it? I’m sure you have the whole place bugged.”

Tony scoffs into his coffee mug. Steve’s unimpressed face sits across the table from him.

“‘Bugged?’ This isn’t the Cold War. I’m not selling information to the KGB,” Steve’s face remained still while Tony continued, “I may have placed some cameras that are patched through to FRIDAY, though, yes.”

A waitress appeared with a tray of food. Steak and eggs for Steve and pancakes and bacon for Tony. The plates are set on the table with their bills tucked neatly under them. Tony snatches up both before Steve can even notice their presence, quietly laughing at the waitress’ phone number written on the back with a heart.

“Bugs, cameras, whatever. Regardless, you know how well the team is coming along, so why ask? You’re not telling me you _care,_ do you?”

It was Tony’s turn to make a face, albeit briefly, before a little boy came up to the table to ask for a selfie. The two men obliged, Tony offering up a peace sign and Steve flashing his trademark All-American smile. The little boy bounded back across the diner and Tony ducked his head close to the table.

“I’m just making sure you’re not running Rhodey into the ground. I mean, by all means, please tire him out, it saves him from bothering me, but just don’t kill the guy.” 

“ _Tony_.”

Stark quietly cut his pancakes. He had absolutely no intention of eating them, it was Happy’s useless sixth sense detecting when Tony was putting unnecessary carbs into his system. Talk about pot calling kettle black. Finally, Tony looked up.

“Has she found any leads?”

“We had eyes on her until she went to see Barton. Then she disappeared off our radar. If she finds anything, she’ll let us know. You and I both know that.” Steve spoke through bites of egg on toast. Natasha had been gone from the Avengers compound for eight weeks without a trace. Tony had admitted after she disappeared that he had been tracking gamma signatures across the globe, but his efforts to locate Doctor Banner and proved fruitless.

Tony sighed. “It has been four months since we found the quinjet abandoned in Greenland. How is it possible that he has gone this long undetected?”

“Fury said that Banner had managed to stay hidden for close to five years without incident,” Steve shrugged, “I don’t doubt he’s found ways to stay safe from SHIELD’s gaze.”

Tony quickly changed the topic of conversation, and after a half-hour, Tony bid farewell to ‘Stars and Stripes Steve’ and started the drive back to New York. Back in his lab, a gamma signature across the country, thought to be nothing more than a lab’s nuclear reactor, started to move.

 


	2. Chapter 2

[Berkley, CA]

A postal worker stood on a front porch, impatiently buzzing the door bell. The satchel at his side was particularly full and it was starting to show. He banged his fist against the door three times before turning to head back to the sidewalk. 

“Wait! Wait just a second! I’m here!” A woman yelled as she half-ran/half-shuffled down the sidewalk in a skirted suit and heels. She caught up to the mail man but was out of breath and rubbing away the stitch in her side.

“Jennifer Walters?” It was asked out of habit, evident that the mail man didn’t really care if she was Miss Walters or not. He pulled a large stack of files, bound together and stamped with red letters reading URGENT. He dropped them into Jennifer’s waiting arms and immediately turned and walked away. As she started to voice her thanks, he cut her off with “Next time, I’m not waiting.”

She shifted the pile of papers from one arm to the other, fumbling around in her jacket’s pockets for her house keys. Taking the four steps up to her front door, she leaned against the door’s frame to continue her search for her keys. A breeze picked up and the front door opened an inch. 

That was when Jennifer noticed that the deadbolt lock had been picked. She nudged the door open further with her foot. “If there are any robbers still in here,” her voice was loud but obviously shaken, “I will warn you right now: I’m a damn good lawyer.” 

To her right, a floorboard creaked and immediately Jen dropped the stack of files and let out a shattering scream. Her cat continued to sit on the floor to her right, licking its paw.

Jennifer took another step forward when the door behind her shut. She spun on her heels and found a short man there, his face shrouded by the hood of his coat.

“Please don’t scream again, Jenny.”

Plucking her glasses from atop her head, Jennifer put them on as she squinted at the figure.

“…Bruce?”

Bruce Banner pulled the hood away from his face, unleashing a mess of black and gray curls. His cheeks looked hollow and the bags under his eyes had bags of their own. It didn’t seem to matter as Jennifer pulled her cousin into a long embrace.

As the sun set Bruce sat on his cousin’s couch, surrounded by quilts and trinkets that screamed American Mid-west, a shocking contrast to the hippie vibe of her California neighborhood. He held a thrifted national park souvenir mug in his hands, just happy to have someone to share a quiet moment with. 

Sitting on the floor across from him, Jennifer was rearranging the papers she had dropped earlier. After the initial shock of her cousin breaking and entering her house subsided, it was like they were back to being children again. There were no awkward questions about what they had been up to in the years since they had last seen each other, just decades-old inside jokes and the sharing of old memories. It was like finding your security blanket in the back of your closet. Still warm and inviting.

Bruce watched her for a moment before breaking the silence.

“What case are you working on?”

Jennifer took a sip from her mug and looked up at Bruce. “Ever heard of Nicholas Trask?”

“…The crime boss?”

Nodding, Jennifer adjusted her glasses. “Yeah. Story is the feds picked him up for tax evasion, and once news of that got out, one of his lackeys in jail started talking. So I’m going through the transcripts from the prison. Just helping out, really.”

“Tax evasion? Like Al Capone?” Bruce started laughing. “I’m glad to see you’re a big-shot lawyer now, Jenny.”

“Bruce, don’t joke. I’ve done nothing but get coffee for the partners for the past three months and now I finally get a chance to get some use of my legal degree? I’m gonna take it.”

Bruce held his hands up, “Hey, I’m not joking. I could use the help of a good lawyer like you one day.”

Jen held eye contact with Bruce for a moment until he looked away with discomfort.

“Why are you here, Bruce? First, you turn up in New York to stop an _alien invasion_ with some type of group of Super Friends, and next thing I know you and Tony Stark are punching each other and leveling an African city, _while another city in Europe floats into the SKY_ , and now here you are. Sitting in my living room. Drinking Swiss Miss with mini marshmallows. Like its nothing!”

Bruce pursed his lips, obviously trying to carefully choose his next words. “Jennifer, you are all I have left.” He smiled into his mug, but it was a futile attempt to hide the pain in his face. “Do you remember the last time I came to see you?”

“Yeah. You waited outside my Criminal Law class to buy me pizza and beer and tell me that you were responsible for creating what the news stations were calling the ‘Hulk’ and _then_ you surprised me with a box of donuts the next morning to clarify that you were, in fact, the ‘Hulk’ and that that would probably be the last time I would see you for a while.”

Bruce sunk into the couch, Jen’s angry gaze searing into his soul. If there was one thing that Bruce could credit his cousin for having, it was a sharp memory. He knew she was omitting his promise to write her on purpose.

“Yeahhhh…. So I guess I don’t have to repeat that speech a second time?” Bruce said it quietly. He was never great at good-byes, that has been evident in the past six months.

Moving to sit next to him on the couch, Jen sat on the edge of the cushion, her hands balling into fists.

“Well donuts would have been nice," Jen paused, "Why this time though? The Hulk is a hero. You guys have saved so many people—“

“He can’t be contained. I—I can’t control him,” Bruce set his mug onto the coffee table with shaking hands, “I can’t have a normal life. I will never be able to….”

He let his sentence fall off into the room. With a sigh, Jen rested her head against her cousin’s. Though she was the younger of the two, Jen was always the strong one for both of them. She would stare death and danger in the face if it would keep the closest thing to a brother she had safe.

It took a few minutes before she finally broke the silence.

“Just promise me two things?”

Bruce huffed, bracing himself to make promises he knew he couldn’t keep.

“One: you stay here for a day. You smell like you could use a hot bath.”

“And two?”

“Actually write me this time, you ass. Would it kill you to spend five cents on a post card?”

The laugh overtook Bruce’s body, starting as a small chuckle that erupted into a full body guffaw. It felt just as good as the tight hug his cousin gave him.

 


	3. Chapter 3

The following day, Bruce sat on the couch, watching his cousin pace barefooted through the living room as she talked on the phone. Quietly he folded his freshly cleaned laundry and packed it back into his rucksack. Years of never being committed to one domicile had taught Bruce how to be an expert at packing efficiently. His shirts were folded and tightly rolled up, clean socks tucked into a spare pair of boots.

After at least the first two hours of the Today Show, Jennifer sat down on the couch with a huff, tossing her cell phone on to the couch cushion next to her. Bruce very quietly refilled Jennifer’s glass with orange juice while she leafed through a stack of papers.

“Should I even ask?”

“Trask made bail last night,” Jen ran an hand through her hair before continuing on, “and my co-counsel just received a threatening letter delivered via a brick through his window.”

Bruce placed a hand on Jen’s knee, feeling how tense she was. She shook her head and placed her head in her hands. “This is ridiculous. My first case and now I have to live in fear of this jackass?” Jen slammed her fists down onto the coffee table and Bruce instinctively flinched.

Before Bruce could say anything, the doorbell rang. Jen sighed as she stood up from the couch, gesturing to the front door. “At least the courier is on time. The one thing I can count on.”

Bruce sat in thought as he watched Jen head for the front door. An unthinkable idea sprang into his head as Jen turned the door knob.

And that was when the unthinkable idea became an unthinkable action.

The gun shot cut through the air and Jen was immediately on the floor. Bruce slid across the room to his cousin’s side, and out of the corner of his eye, he watched a man leap into the back of a car that peeled out down the street and out of sight.

Blood was already starting to soak through Jen’s clothes, and Bruce hovered over her putting pressure on the entry wound in her chest. Jen slowly placed a weak, shaky hand over her cousin’s.

“No. No no no no no no.” Bruce kept repeating the word over and over, a quiet mantra keeping his focus on the moment. This moment. This moment, he needed to keep his head. He pulled a hand away from Jen to reach for her cell phone, teetering on the edge of the couch. He wrapped his fingers around it and begun to dial 911, but was stopped by Jen knocking the phone from his hands.

“Jennifer, you need to get to a hospital. What the hell—“

“They can’t see you…with me.”

Bruce cursed under his breath and reached up to wipe the nervous sweat away from his brow with a bloodied hand. She was right. If he called the emergency services they would see her with him. Not only would he be immediately be pegged as a suspect, but pretty much every law enforcement branch in 100 counties had his face plastered over their “most wanted” boards.

He got up from the floor and crossed the room to his bag, which he ripped through and grabbed the first aid kit sitting in the bottom. Undoing the latches of the kit, Bruce pulled out a wrapped venipuncture kit and ripped it open. He had no choice. This is what he had to do.

“Ok, Jenny, just stay with me here. Just stay with me.”

The tourniquet wrapped around his arms and the needle slid into his skin within seconds. He did the same to Jen. Her voice echoed in the back of his mind, reminding him that they were the same blood type. Goosebumps rose on his skin as he felt his warm blood travel through the tubing into Jen’s arm.

Within seconds, Bruce saw the wound in her chest close and form new skin. His face went pale as he looked down at the catheter in his arm and realized the gravity of what he had just done.

The gamma radiation. The curse, his burden to bear. It now ran through her veins. His heart thumped in his chest and he fought the urge to rip the catheter from his arm. It was either let his only family die in his arms or curse her with a life not unlike his. One where you're constantly running, hiding, never stopping.

An involuntary sigh escaped Jen’s lips and Bruce couldn’t help but smile as he saw her heart beat at a normal pace.

In the distance, he heard sirens. Someone had clearly heard the gunshot and called 911. There wasn’t much time. Bruce carefully removed the needle from his cousin’s arm, shoving the equipment into a plastic bag and back into his backpack. The pack slid onto his shoulders in a fluid motion, and his feet slid into his shoes just as quick. Bruce paused for a minute to lightly kiss Jen’s cheek before he ran for the back door. He leapt over the fence in the backyard just as he could hear the front door be forced open by the EMTs.


	4. Chapter 4

The steady beep from the ECG pulled Jen from her sleep. She was in the hospital, wires and tubes connecting her body to the various machinery surrounding her. Her body felt heavy and weak, her eyes barely focusing on the ceiling above her. Her head rolled to one side, looking at the vase with a fake flower and a plastic pitcher of water sitting on the table next to her. The flower was an unnatural purple, and its silk petals were frayed and showing their age. Jen thought about how sad that flower was before her eyes rolled back into her head and she fell back asleep.

Hours later Jen heard muffled voices on the other side of the door to her room. Through the frosted glass pane, she could make out at least two large figures having a conversation. She tried to focus on what they were saying, but the beeping of the ECG kept overlapping the conversation. 

Glancing at the whiteboard across from her bed, Jen noticed that written in green marker was ‘YOUR NURSES: JILL AND CAROLINE.’ The door knob was turning and Jen shut her eyes and forced herself to lie still.

Two large men entered the room, dressed in scrubs that were a size too small. One man was carrying a syringe and a vial on a metal tray. “Time for a check-up, Miss Walters,” the other man said while shutting the door behind him. Jen heard the distinct sound of the lock being turned. Her body froze.

“Just a little something to help you sleep better. And longer.”

“Yeah, consider it ‘get well never’ gift from Nicholas Trask.”

Jen’s eyes shot open before the syringe broke her skin. She looked into the eyes of her would-be assassins, her hand had grabbed the wrist of the man in front of her.

The beeping of the ECG had accelerated, her heart was pounding. Adrenaline coursed through her veins and Jen could feel her grip tightening on the wrist held in her hand. Before she knew it he was screaming in pain, his wrist a crumpled broken mess in the palm of her hand.

Her whole body felt like it was being torn apart, the fear and adrenaline hitting every fiber and nerve of her being and reforming it into something new. The second man in the room screamed as he stared at Jen, her skin was turning green.

Jen flung the first assailant into the second, the two men hitting the far wall and cracking the drywall before landing on the floor in a heap of flesh.

“Jesus Christ! Look at that thing! It’s some kind of…of… _She-Hulk!”_

The hospital bed slid across the room towards them, effectively trapping them against the wall. Ripping the tubes and wires from her green flesh, Jen picked up the end table. The vase and silk flower fell to the floor, and she used the end table to break the glass window and leap out onto the street below.

Landing in front of a car on the street, the car skidded to a halt and blared its horn at the green amazonian standing in front of it. Without hesitation, Jen ripped a light pole from the cement sidewalk and drove it through the engine block of the car.

“Yield to pedestrians! Can’t you see I’m walking here?!” a booming voice escaped Jen’s lips. She looked into the windshield at the driver’s face and saw the horrified expression on his face. Turning, she looked around at the people standing on the street. They were staring, afraid. Jen looked down at her hands and saw the green skin covering her bones. A gasp left her lungs and she quickly ran down the closest alleyway.

She could already hear the people yelling and screaming.

Jen kept running until she found a dumpster to hide behind. Her hand covered her heart, trying to will it to slow down. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing, the screaming and yelling and sirens faded away into a blur of white noise. She was terrified, plain and simple. Quietly, Jen started to mutter ‘you’re safe’ to herself over and over.

As her heart beat started to even out and the adrenaline faded away, Jen fell to her knees and couldn’t fight the bile surging in her throat. She violently threw up into gutter. After a few brief minutes of dry heaving and spitting the taste from her mouth, she slowly rose to her feet.

There was no way she could go back to the hospital now. Her hands balled into fists at her side, the knuckles and joints popping back into place.

She took off running down the street, barefoot and still clad in her hospital gown.

—————

AC/DC shook through the speakers in Tony’s lab. Mask on, he was busy with a welding torch, making some ‘improvements’ for Sam’s Falcon wings. On a tool bench within arms reach were two sheets of flame decals. _So you look faster than you are._

Across the room, a holo-notification popped up and started beeping. The music covered up the chime, and Tony was too busy using the welding torch as an air guitar to care. Just as he was about to break into a power slide that would make Pete Townshend of The Who jealous, the music turned off.

“What the hell?” The welding mask flipped up and Tony spun around the room. Rhodey stood in the door way, arms folded across his chest.

“Hardly working?”

“You, my good friend, do not know what ‘working hard’ looks like.”

“Right,” Rhodey crossed over to the work bench and looked at the sticker sheets. “Oh, Sam will just _love_ these.”

“Why are you here, Colonel Rhodes?”

“It’s Thursday. Thai Takeout Thursday.”

Tony whipped around towards his computer. “FRIDAY, why didn’t you—“ He stopped before taking a step towards the monitors.

Rhodey rolled his eyes and huffed. “No, that’s totally fine. ‘Sorry, Rhodes. Sorry that I completely forgot that we eat Thai food every Thursday night. In fact, I’m sorry I have been so forgetful ever since Pepper—“ 

Tony made an annoyed noise in his throat and waved his hand at his friend. He reached his monitors and tilted his head at the flashing notification. With a two-handed gesture, the screen expanded and turned a bright shade of green. Rhodey stopped his impression of Tony and crossed the room to him, staring at the screen as well.

“That can’t be what I think it is.”

Tony could hide his grin. “A non-nuclear spike in gamma radiation.” He touched the screen and a map appeared.

“…In California?”

“Hey, have you _had_ the beet and avocado salad from Bar Tartine? That’s not something you can just reproduce from stuff at home!”

Both of them stared at the screen in silence for a beat.

“…So are you going to tell her?”

Tony idly scratched at the back of his head as he removed the welding mask and placed it on his desk. “She’s a spy. I’m sure she already knows.” He gave a quick look around the room, peering for hidden cameras he knew weren’t there. Rhodey cleared his throat and gave a quiet but solid “ _Tony.”_

Shifting his weight from foot to foot, Tony expanded the map in front of them. “Not going to tell her until we’re sure. No point in sending her on a wild goose chase or getting her hopes up.” He turned to his suit, sitting against the wall. “FRIDAY, set a flight plan.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

“So that’s it? You’re just gonna head out there _alone_? Work unfinished?” Rhodes gestured to the wings on the workbench.

Tony looked around the room for a moment before nodding. “Uhh…yep. Exactly.” Already the pieces of the Iron Man suit were flying off the wall and reassembling around Tony’s body. As the helmet enveloped his head and the lights in the eyes turned on, Tony put his hands on Rhodey’s shoulders.

"And what are you going to do if you do find Bruce? What will you do if he's...." Rhodes trailed off as he flexed his arms and made an angry face.

“Cross that bridge when I get to it. By the way, _when_ you tell Nat, I’d prefer if you didn’t drop my name. Put the blame on SHIELD or someone like that. She scares me.” Tony pushed Rhodey out of the way gently but with force. A metal hand gave a two fingered salute and the processed voice uttered a quick “ _Colonel_ ” before taking off through a skylight in the ceiling.

Now left standing alone in the lab, Rhodey shrugged his shoulders before leaving, muttering something about flame decals on the War Machine armor.


End file.
